A Week in Scraps
by bitter avocado
Summary: Yes this half-life of love is forever, but you can only be patient for so long. Illumi/OC


"Illumi was a monster everything about him was a grey" is a line he knew well.

Illumi was the circle of an empty day, brutal and at night he tightened around your neck like a noose. Stairs would haemorrhage and paintings drew red—he couldn't remember the last time he felt the cold. Such smothered memories, folding themselves neatly into limbless monsters, began to gnaw away at his heart. And while it's true there's little to differentiate a murderer from a _murderer_, it could be summed up like this:

"Killua I hardly know you anymore", "Killua be home by seven", "Killua where are you?", "Killua, dad needs to speak with you", "Killua where are you going"- _beep_.

Heat buzzing off the fluorescent light-bulbs warmed his skin as Illumi walked the grey length of his mind. Yes, nothing was enough for Killua anymore. Well, it was murder to see them die in red, but he was a _murderer_ and Mother was a _murderess_ and they were all _murderess_—this was what they do. (Murdererererer-)

Over the Ulleung Basin, he heard the soft and gentle '_plop, plop'_ of the cars and bodies tipping over the Asa Bridge that connected the island of Drogo with Yukan city, like punches to the chest. The last time Illumi worked with dad was in the summer they went to Osakan, the year they plotted the Kyrokan Massacre. He had learnt about justice from dad quite early. They used to work together—dad was bigger and better, so he always walked in front, sometimes breaking into a run or vacuuming into shadows like he never left. They used to find people sometimes; find them and stalk them and _thwack thwack_ killed them dead.

Illumi wanted to know why it had to be _Killua_ who turned out like this—defiant and unruly, a revolution corruption in its own right. He was _that_ prodigal son of a family of killers, wasn't he? Yet _why did it_ _have to be Killua?_

His transmitter beeped. He responded back affirmative. Water boiled at eighty degrees centigrade in Yukan. Illumi always boiled when Killua was the problem.

"_I'm done._"

"Status?" Static cackled on the other side, and for a moment, Illumi felt everything lurch itself away from him and towards the rims of the world.

"_Fine._"

"Okay, be home tonight before 12-" _Beep._

Illumi breathed and inhaled came the scent of something astringent mingling with the burning of human skin. The erupted bridge behind him bubbled again with a finality. He stepped over a whimpering body—spine severed and benumbed with choke-hold death. Outside the _MAXCON_ president's office lay a haze of stars over the burning of the Asa Bridge. Voicelessly, and with one hand over a blood-red gap in his chest, Illumi swung his legs out the window, and dropped down the building like gravity calling the moon.

It was 11PM. The night was dark with something more than night. He passed a college house party with music like a violent scribble in one of the many narrow terraces. Illumi hoped Killua would never want to go to college. He suspected he knew the answer already.

Then, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came, and with it, Illumi felt something inside of him slip away. He crossed into a dark corner of the street before slumping against the alley wall, twenty-seven shades of kaleidoscope blur obscuring his vision from the half world of his—oh crap, he forgot to confirm with Milluki. Too late now.

* * *

Picture this: it's Yukan city. Exotic vacation central, monsoon season two hundred and forty days a year, and the land of 365 days of '_god damn these mosquitos!'_ and the beach and the palm trees and that millennial-old jungle killing a total of 3.8 Hunters each year and 14 people. This was a mumble jumble hastily pasted together city of postmodern artists and half-hearted pastiches, stuck perpetually in the 40s, where time only moved as fast as you wanted it to go. Except the Zoldycks never went anywhere for the vacation, weather, or views.

Illumi slammed awake at 2.20AM in the dark morning, on a strange bed, in a stranger house. The last time he had slept so deeply was when he was four and had almost lost his arm. He let this thought drop though, having only slept for three hours. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he flooded his En throughout the building.

Two targets, both with Nen.

How carelessly he slipped back in autopilot, with such pronounced holes in his heart, how _hollow_ he was. This silent house was airy with conspicuous skylights and expansive windows—easy to exit and easy to enter. What a paradox. No respectable Nen user would reside in such plebeian housing. And so in the glorious pink of the morning, Illumi stalked down the hallway. He paused before a bedroom door.

The moment he stepped inside, a figure on the bed bolted upright. He was at their neck in an instant, hand poised like a knife raised high under the sun. Their delayed reaction only confirmed his suspicions.

"Do not scream and do not move. Close your eyes if you understand." Their eyes fluttered close and heartbeat soared. "I'm going to ask you to answer a few questions. If you lie, I'll kill you. If you don't answer, I'll kill you. Open your eyes if you understand."

Ah, it was a woman. Illumi saw the whites of her eyes and reflected back in them was an image of himself.

He blinked that away. "Why I am here?"

She opened her mouth and her voice cracked. Illumi felt the heat rise on her face. She cleared her throat and tried again, "I found you in this alley on my way home from my-"

"Where were you leaving?"

"-My friend's party, it was just down the-"

"Who else lives here?"

"Oh it's just me-"

"_Try again._"

Illumi could feel her heart thumping out of her chest. This rise and fall of a human heart captured him for a moment.

"_Honestly_ I live alone—I mean I have a pet fish but-" A capillary burst in her neck. She shut her eyes. When she opened them again, they met with Illumi's—a raw and saturated blue, seemingly cut from an inner wedge of the sky. (_I have to do this_, she thought. Then: _and even if I can't, I have to_.)

"How do you know Nen?" He pressed on.

She blinked, "_Nen_?" Vacuous, dim, dark and aphotic—she felt an actual chill from looking at him. A prehistoric and subterranean fear gripped her mind, yet her heart kept bursting on, like a sparrow half-mad in a cage. _Oh god no_, she breathed deeply as one single thought caught her: _I will not end here_. "I don't know what _Nen_ is," she cautiously pressed, "but I can take it away."

Silence engulfed the room. At this, Illumi felt everything stop. "Explain."

The woman released a breath as the hesitation of relief murmured against her heart. "Your sorrows, your fears, your sins and your regrets—I can take it all away."

"Oh?" He drawled, twirling a needle in his hand.

"I found you because you had this _awful_ aura—do you call it aura? I don't really know to be honest, and this might sound totally _strange_," she gave an awkward laugh, blood viridian drooling down her neck. "But I'm always been able to… feel? These kind of things. Yeah. Like the ones you have behind you right now." She narrowed her eyes in scrutiny, staring at him, yet not entirely _at him_. "They're screaming _bloody murder_ or something… oh wow." Her heart plummeted. _What a monster he was._ Yet her half hooded eyes memorised this killer-murderer with eyes so black they absorbed light, and in that moment she thought, _he's not the worst I've seen_.

Illumi found it was him staring at her now. _Gyo? No. Nen Hypersensitivity? _"Show me," he commanded and something in Sakamae visibly evaporated. She looked to his hand. He loftily raised it. She closed her eyes again and took it—_idiotic_, Illumi dimly registered with condescension, _how fearless_—then she wiped something away from her eyes with her other hand, and placed it on top of his hand. Illumi's fingers were spider thin and rough, as though the millions of constellation scars that connected over his skin were real and alive. _Oh actually, tears are the medium_, he raised an eyebrow. And unlike Killua's warm and painful tears after the first time his 150 bones out of the 206 were broken for training, he felt nothing at hers.

At once after this thought, a translucent fog heavy with water vapours poured over the two of them and stuffed the room with cold quietude. _Oh_, slipped out, and Illumi suddenly understood _everything_. His mouth twisted into a crude thing barely resembling a smile. _This is a Nen exorcist formidable enough to remove the remains of dead Nen users' residue._ Then his heart skipped, and while it was long enough for Illumi to apprehend the fact that his heartbeat had stopped briefly and was now offbeat, it was not nearly long enough for him to understand why. A thrill began to engulf him as a droplets of water rolled down his cheek and dampened his hair. _This could be very useful._

She opened her eyes again like a prehistoric subterranean sea creature, eyes still misty with beads of water gathering along her dark eyelashes as the early morning glow escaped into the room. Her mouth opened, like she wanted to say something, but she stopped herself. _Correct choice_, Illumi thought.

He stood up, imposing his height with his dead eyes over her. "Fascinating," a deviant hunger tip-toed around the glaring switch in his head. "I'll be back tomorrow." And Illumi vanished in the same moment she dared to rub the moisture from her eyes.

She thinks her heart might've just died.

* * *

Her footsteps could be heard from the end of the street. Thinking back, Illumi judged it couldn't have been logical to assume she was a Nen user, but she had done well to not attempt to immediately kill herself after their encounter (which has happened to him five times before). He was waiting on the lounge in the dark, silently seeking the dimly lit depths of an aquarium that spanned the length of the living room for any sign of life. An aquatic fern swirled in the bubbles of an air pump in the tank. _Do people enjoy such hobbies?_

The front door slammed shut. The light flicked on. Grocery bags rustled as the stench of seafood wafted over to him. The woman walked across the room and right over him, then she stopped at one side of the tank and tapped the glass.

Something glinting snapped in the depths of the waters. At once, Illumi tensed.

Amusingly enough, she didn't seem to notice him at all, and instead began to murmur _coos_ and gentle _lovelove_ whispers. The woman cracked open a container of squirming goldfish. There was a net in her hand.

Antarctic ice lashed out of the water and _hurled_ towards him with the force of a tornado. He blinked. No, just an afterimage. So there was something just like him here; he hadn't been wrong. When she turned around towards the tank, Illumi was there.

The woman jumped and stumbled to the side, hands flying over her screaming heart. Illumi idly plucked the gasping goldfish flying through the air from the fishnet. Her chest was heaving.

"Oh! You're back, wow um-"

"Actually I've been here since you left this morning at 9:28." She stared at him in disbelief. "Your ignorance is… disconcerting, to say the least."

The insult glided off her smoothly. Instead, questions like, _who are you_, _what do you want with me_, _god what are you_ fizzed and popped on the tip of her tongue. She swallowed them back. "Would you like something to eat?"

Illumi regarded her with chill distaste. A self-deprecating smile, quick and laughing, flickered over her face but she dipped her head and it was gone. She turned back to the task at hand, cracking open the lid of goldfish again and scooping most of it into a much smaller tank beside her. Occasionally, her croppy hair would infuriatingly fall over her face as Illumi watched her, like a hawk would watch a pigeon. She possessed a charm that could disappear in moments, like a gold light in certain old paintings. Her ramrod straight posture, straight-laced and poised, was paradoxical to this undone, don't care hair and that faded out vintage denim jeans with a crew-neck sweater falling effortlessly from the shoulder. She scooped up the remaining few fish from the container and dropped it into the large tank.

It entered the water's surface.

Aura, like late winter ice with glimpses of steam, striked the fish, disabling its ability to breath, before it was engulfed by a large, endless mouth. The seemingly infinite length of a creature twisted, and at last, Illumi's eyes met with its. Then it flicked its tail, the gleam of the scales shining like a knife raised high, and it vanished into the depths like a snake. Illumi heard the glass creak and groan.

She was gazing at him apprehensively again. Illumi hid his needles. Yes, this must've been the other Nen user he felt.

"That's Gyokudo, he's a five-year-old Giant Snakehead. They're native to this region," she explained gently. Illumi roved over her expression with a lofty nonchalance.

Her eyes smashed into his like hail beating into a frozen lake. It was a confronting stare.

That creature was definitely smarter than the usual animal inside a glass tank but Illumi was most captivated by the level of understanding present in the gleam of its eyes. He viewed it from outside the tank, and to him, it was as though the fish was contained inside the glass. Yet the people who viewed it from outside the glass instead appeared like it was _them_ who was inside the glass, from its perspective. This brutal reality was reflected in the blue, sun-strained stare of hers. They had the same sort of livid strength in their eyes, a rare sort of self-destructive honesty.

Abruptly, as though she had slowly drawn the conclusion that Illumi no longer had the intention to kill her, the woman opened her mouth and, "My name's Sakamae, what's your name?"

* * *

I'M BACK

Okay, I know, it's been like 10 years and honestly I feel like I'm worse than Togashi when it comes to writing haha because I can't seem to keep stories continuing for longer than two chapters LOL. But I have rewritten the beginning of a week in scraps, simply because I really hated the old one. It wasn't a reflective of my writing capabilities and I think you'll all enjoy this one must better.

HOPE TO SEE YOU SOON (maybe lol don't count on it)

ps. If you have any questions, queries or comments, feel free to drop a review or a pm.


End file.
